Image Gallery

Saturday, April 5th Hashimoto Contemporary will be presenting “A Glow That Transfers Creativity”, a solo show by German born, Bay Area artist Mario Wagner. The multi-media exhibition consists of technicolor paintings, collage-based installations and hypnotic animations that flickering on old tube televisions. By way of a fanciful color palette and retro-futurist style, Wagner manifests a new world torn between the past and future, the old and the new. His blend of digitally rendered and hand-crafted works projects an eerie, yet entrancing look at the motions of a society so strange and yet, at the same time, so familiar.

"A Glow That Transfers Creativity" delves into the ways in which collage reanimates the forgotten, the overlooked and the discarded. A woman calling for her children at the dinner hour becomes a brightly hued figure with beams of mysterious energy shooting from her palms. Half the pleasure of interpreting Wagner's images lies in trying to imagine their original formal constructs and contexts. The original images are magazine cut outs, scanned, then transformed into abstracted shapes, re-composed and then applied onto various surfaces including canvas, silk, wood and digital screen. Finally, a heavy handed application of saturated color further obscures the origins of the objects and subjects in his works. The resulting images evoke
memories of the iconic album cover art of The Cure's “In between days” single.

Wagner’s debut exhibition with the gallery is comprised of many different components, ranging from a large scale installation to multimedia works in video, collage, fashion and two dimensional paintings, all of which employ both analogue and digital methods of manipulation. His large-scale work is comprised of elements from his recent installation at ART.COM, which compliments his new series of two dimensional paintings. A grouping of intimately sized canvases depict unhinged scenarios of color that echoes their archived ancestors. These vibrant interactions have also been translated into a silk scarf, furthering the artist’s exploration of fashion as art. Wagner then translates his images even further, morphing them into a group of several looping animations. Focusing on the mundane actions of everyday life, each video quietly grows more unnerving as the repetition continues. This silent tension pulls throughout the show, resulting in Wagner’s hybridization of time and space that speaks to a lost ideal of the future.